What are the downsides of communicating a key differentiation in your name?

One reason is that because of rapidly changing nature of business, today’s competitive advantage can easily become tomorrow’s disadvantage…or at least irrelevancy.

Think about how useful the name Tote.com would be for a shopping site developing a social-sharing universal shopping bag/cart. Pretty cool, huh? But what happens when that doesn’t work particularly well so they pivot to socially-sharing images? Wouldn’t, um, “Pinterest.com” be a little more useful?

Of course, you can try to game the system and figure out in advance where you’ll be AFTER you pivot and extend your line of business. But then you end up with a heck of a lot of customers trying to figure out why a mail order DVD rental company is called “netflix.com“.

Through painful experience, many industry professionals have learned that it usually makes more sense to go generic and ambiguous, allowing your genius marketers to add the meaning to simple, catchy URLs.

That’s why instead of naming your PEZ dispenser trading site “pezheads.com“, you’d probably be better off with “eBay.com“. Or instead of using “cheapbooks.com” for your online discount bookseller, a better choice might be the more flexible “Amazon.com“.

Written by David S. Rose

David S. Rose
Founder and CEO,
Gust

David has been described as "the Father of Angel Investing in New York" by Crain's New York Business, & a "world conquering entrepreneur" by BusinessWeek. He is a serial entrepreneur & Inc 500 CEO who chairs New York Angels, one of the most active angel investment groups. David is also CEO of Gust.

You might also be interested in

We’ve just released our free Co-founder Equity Split tool. It’ll give you a fair and objective recommendation about how to divide your startup’s ownership, so you and your co-founders will have a sensible, real starting point for this notoriously hard, crucially important conversation.

Many startup founders find themselves lacking clarity and direction when it comes time to divide their

With startup growth up 61% since 2014 and more investment programs emerging, it can be overwhelming for founders to know just where to jump in. As the most startup-friendly accelerator on the planet, MassChallenge has helped 835 startup companies around the world, who have raised over $1.1 billion in funding and created over 6,500 jobs. We have seen startups at

Update 2017: To help you understand how your startup will look to investors according to this methodology, we’ve created a fundraising feedback tool that will give you investor-level insight into your startup’s performance. In just about 15 minutes, it will tell you how much money your startup is likely to raise, where you can find that capital, and what to

After less than a year, Glassbreakers is now a team of 10, we have thousands of active users on our free product, we’ve expanded into enterprises with paying customers and raised over a million in seed funding. After a few of my Glassbreaker matches inquired, I started to reflect on what it’s like to build a startup